


The City

by kitsunerei88



Category: Alice In Wonderland - Lewis Carroll, Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft
Genre: Alternate Universe - Lovecraft Fusion, Gen, Horror, Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-07
Updated: 2020-07-07
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:41:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25131058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kitsunerei88/pseuds/kitsunerei88
Summary: My mother, Alice Hargreaves née Liddell, spent a lifetime tripping into worlds not her own. What is remarkable, I suspect, is the fact that she lived so long as she did.
Comments: 9
Kudos: 22
Collections: Crossworks 2020





	The City

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DareMe (IncognitoMe)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/IncognitoMe/gifts).



I.

There are an untold number of mysteries in the world, including many, I think, that it is better for mankind to leave unsolved. The scientists, with their sight, their smell and their other senses, aided and unaided, seek unflinchingly and unfalteringly to understand the world more thoroughly; while the effort is perhaps worthwhile, I cannot resist my innate urge to demand that they stop searching, cease questioning, and let the sleeping dogs lie.

The human mind is a delicate, fallible vessel, ill-equipped to handle the immensity of the universe. There are things that no man can comprehend, which are best left undisturbed on the pain of, if not death, insanity. There are days in which I wonder which would be worse: the death, or the insanity?

In this respect, my mother was perhaps the strongest woman of my acquaintance. No; rather, the strongest _person_ in my acquaintance. She lived through her wits, her nerve, and her good judgement, through events that have no doubt killed lesser men.

The beginnings of her condition are well known among the cultured elite. They were documented—a faerie tale of sorts—by her childhood friend and chronicler: Lewis Carroll. _Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland_ , they have come to be called, a childhood classic in literary nonsense. Carroll’s delightful rendition hides a darker tale, one which my mother only ever hinted at in the broadest of strokes. Protected to a degree by her age, she has only rarely referred to the nearness of her execution in that story. As a child, I read _Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland_ with a sense of wonder and pride that my mother, my own mother, featured so prominently in such a handsome, leather-bound volume; as an adult, able to read more fully between the lines of what was never written to match with the pallor of my mother’s face, I am filled only with horror. Death in a dream is the same as death in life, or so my mother has always taught me.

Throughout my childhood, my mother was known to have fits. It is, perhaps, a fortunate circumstance that she was a woman, for such a weakness would have been far less tolerated in a man. So long as my mother caused no trouble, and my father made no complaint, she remained safe from the asylum and her fits remained a quiet secret among family. No more than twice a year and no less than once every two years my mother would fall asleep and would remain comatose—insensate to any and all for some time. On one occasion I recall, she was asleep a full two weeks; on another she awoke after merely three days with a stern shake of her head and an obstinate pursing of her lips.

My father was a gentler and kinder soul than my mother. He, with all the poise expected of the man of the house, would merely check every hour—on the hour—to see that she still breathed. “Once within, only she can break herself out, my dear Emma,” he would tell me gently, and he would pat my head after drawing warm covers over my mother. “We keep her body safe and warm, and fed as we are able, and we pray to God that she returns to us.”

I suspect, as I have for some time, that my father had had his own encounters with the occult, though never once did he speak of them. Men are not otherwise so patient with women who fall asleep for days on end, or so I am given to understand; nor, I think, would any other man have tolerated her other eccentricities as my father did.

My mother was capable of a wide range of talents that were considered at best odd, and at worst unnatural. She knew the basics of hand-to-hand self-defence, taught to her by a nut-brown, toothless man from the island of Okinawa, and which she passed on to me and required me to practice with alarming regularity. She had a wide collection of books on the occult which she guarded zealously from prying eyes, and an even stranger array of items that she commonly referred to as her protective amulets. The so-called Eye of Horus dominated our sitting room, the Pentacle had a place of prominence over my bed, and the sign of Mars held sway over my parents’ bed. Bindrunes could be found repeated in our home furnishings, on our throws, draperies, and even inserted in each of our paintings.

On her passing, all her possessions became mine. And within them I found the journals.

II.

_March 23, 1925_

_I dreamed again of the City. It calls to me, a horrifying vista of enormous, limestone blocks, worked together in impossible configurations that nonetheless seemed whole. Against my will, in dream I approached, reaching one hand towards one of the harsh, blocky monoliths. My hand came away, wet and dripping with icy green ooze, which glowed with a soft, poisonous light. The stone was covered in carvings, strange hieroglyphs formed of sharp, spiked strokes._

_It was a true dream, this time. The true dreams precede the involuntary journey that I know is coming; if the journey itself is a curse, the dreams are a blessing, for they allow preparation. As little as I wished to, I walked further into the dark, shadowed morass._

_The dimensions of the city were impossible. There were spheres of gargantuan proportions, and spires that seemed to twist as they reached into the cloudless, green sky. No stars twinkled above me; not a surprise, because these other worlds so rarely have anything like stars. If there were any marker of the real compared to the unreal, it would be the stars._

_It stank. The air stank of rotting flesh, akin to a fishmonger’s but without a fishmonger’s attempt at cleanliness. I tore a strip off the bottom of my dress to wrap around my face, though it did little to hide the awful, reeking stench._

_The streets were cobble-stone, roughly hewn and melded together with darkness, and their narrow twists and turns that had me quickly losing my nerve. Despite my best efforts, it seemed as if all paths were designed to lead inwards, inwards and ever inwards. At times, I would turn, attempting to retrace my steps and backtrack to anything that I thought I might once recognize; but the labyrinth seemed to change on me, twisting into unrecognizable circuits that I knew I had never followed. A horrendous sound grew louder around me, swelling in the air, and I could not help but fear as I tread, moving as quickly and silently as I dared, through the infernal maze._

_F'nglui mglw'naff Cthulhu R'lyeh waga'nagl fhtagn!_

_F'nglui mglw'naff Cthulhu R'lyeh waga'nagl fhtagn!_

_F'nglui mglw'naff Cthulhu R'lyeh waga'nagl fhtagn!_

_The chill words rang through the air, and I woke up._

* * *

_March 27, 1925_

_I dreamed again of the City, and this time chose not to enter its depths. Not forward, this time, but away from the horrible, otherworldly towers that stretched into the distance._

_It was wet. The earth, if it was indeed earth and nothing worse, squelched under my feet, and my boots quickly became ruined and waterlogged. This was no place for a lady; nor place for a man, however unpolished. Further from the city, the reek was less overwhelming. The corpse-rot stench of the dead was cut with the sting of salt-brine in my nostrils, and I knew that I approached the sea._

_The weeds under my feet and around me were tangled and limp, a thick dark-green carpet that did nothing to prevent the cold of the ground from bleeding upwards into my feet. Around me, strange shapes stretched, not stone buildings but trees of indeterminate breed. Their fingers reached towards me, grasping, but I avoided them in my course towards the rushing waves that I could hear only faintly in the distance._

_The shoreline was dotted with broken masonry, the remains of an old, Cyclopodean structure that perhaps had once held out the sea. Another few minutes walk down the shoreline, and I saw a decrepit pier, with the remains of what appeared to be a makeshift, half-sunken raft. The sea was vast, troubled, with white surf dotting the waves, but of everything in this strange place, it is the least threatening._

_There were stars in the skies, which glowed a deep, midnight blue. But there was no escape, and as I came to this realization, I woke up._

* * *

_April 1, 1925_

_I am too old for these journeys. Nearly sixty-seven years old, and even in dream I do not move as quickly as I once did. I have escaped too many worlds, too many strange dimensions, and yet something about this world brings me nothing but dread. I cannot resist the voice within me that tells me that this journey, this visit, will be the one from which I never awake._

_I leave these words for my Emma—my prized daughter, alone among my sons and my sole survivor. Leave the stones unturned, and burn these journals._

III.

My mother passed on April 2, 1925. Her death, though in her sleep, was not a peaceful one.

There was a thunderstorm on that evening. The lightning that flashed though the skies was too bright, too frequent, and too close. The forks rent the skies, breathtaking; the servants feared to leave the manor. The walls shuddered at the roaring thunderclaps, which drowned out even the deluge of rain and hail on the rooftop. The wind howled, and in the distance one could see, from the inconstant flash of lightning, the trees on the grounds bent nearly double.

Near the witching hour, my mother roused. She sat up, her blue eyes wide, and her mouth open wide and her jaw slack with horror. Her mouth worked as if speaking and I reached out, hoping that she had awakened; but the crashing thunder and roaring wind made whatever words she shrieked all but unintelligible.

_F'nglui mglw'naff Cthulhu R'lyeh waga'nagl fhtagn!_

And then she fell backwards on her pillow, dead.

I burned the journals; eleven hardbound volumes. The stench they gave off was acrid, as otherworldly as the purple sparks leaping through the air as they were immolated. I did not try to read them before I did so, not because I am not curious, but simply because I am not my mother. My mother was incomparable, and she has long taught me well—

In some things, curiosity is not worth the price.

**Author's Note:**

> DareMe: Thank you so much for giving me a prompt that let me try my hand at some Lovecraftian horror, and I hope I didn't disappoint! It was a lot of fun to write, especially because Lovecraftian horror is very unlike anything I've ever written before.
> 
> I really aimed to mimic the language and style of Lovecraft, as well as the style of horror at the time. One of the interesting things about horror of this period is that little of it is told directly by the person to whom the events happened. The protagonist of _Call of Cthulhu_ , for example, only relates and knits together three tales from other people to relate the story to the reader. Hence, most of Alice's story is told by an original character, her daughter (the real Alice Liddell had three sons, two of whom died in WWI); and for anyone who wants to check, the story itself dovetails rather nicely with Lovecraft's short story (because creativity? I don't know her). 
> 
> Thanks to my husband for beta-reading, and thanks to everyone for reading!


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